"Sloppy focus" is such a great productivity helper but Ubuntu 19.04 seems to have removed it.
The new "focus on hover" option (available from gnome tweak) means if I Alt-Tab to another app but my mouse is still over the old window then the old window immediately receives focus again - so Alt-Tab becomes useless!
Is there some way to get the previous behaviour back?
"Software" shows me the following:
It offers Install buttons. Click one briefly makes it change, but I can't read what it says because it then disappears quickly. Then a moment later the screen comes back exactly as it was in the first instance and this screenshot.
What does that mean? Can I use "Software" to install BIOS updates? Am I doing the wrong thing? Is it just broken?
Thanks.
PS. Running Ubuntu Gnome 17.04 on Dell XPS15 9550. UEFI boot.
1. Flashing a Dell BIOS in a Linux Only Environment
As Linux and Ubuntu distributions are becoming more and more popular on Dell systems, there are more situations where a Linux only environment is present. UEFI Capsule updates
If your system is listed at https://secure-lvfs.rhcloud.com/lvfs/devicelist External Link then it supports UEFI capsule updates and can be updated natively within the OS.
Ubuntu 16.04 and later natively will notify you for BIOS updates. The system will regularly check for BIOS updates automatically. When an update is available, a popup will be displayed to flash the update.
source. Nb. my system is listed in the device list page.
Thanks to @Rinzwind's answer, I manually downloaded the BIOS update from Dell, stuck it at /boot/efi (need to do that with sudo) and had the Dell install it from the F12 options. Now "Software" only lists the TPM update, which again will not install. Also there's no download for that listed on Dell's site. So I'm not sure what to do about that.
After installing Firefox Developer Edition using the Aurora PPA method on 16.04 I dragged the icon from Activities to the launcher sidebar for handy access. But when I click that I get a 2nd firefox icon appear in the sidebar:
And every time I click the icon I added I get a new window. How can I get it to behave normally (i.e. when clicked it would display an already running firefox, or if there isn't one, start one)?
I'd like to write a script to take an image file, scale it 50% and put it on the clipboard so it can be pasted easily. The bit I'm stuck on is how to place an image on the clipboard.
I know of xclip, but AFAICS that only deals with text. Is it possible to have an image on the clipboard without the application that generated it sitting around? - Sorry I'm not sure of the internals of how the clipboard works!
Thanks to Florian's answer below I was able to achieve what I wanted, which was to take a screenshot and automatically scale it to a max of 600px wide (e.g. for pasting into an email). The further problem I faced was that Thunderbird won't accept image/png from the clipboard. I got round this by converting it to text/html with a data url. Here's my code in case anyone finds it useful:
#!/bin/bash
TMP=/tmp/screenshot.png
function screenshotfail {
notify-send -u low -i image "Screenshot failed."
exit
}
# Take screenshot
gnome-screenshot -a -b -p -f "$TMP" || screenshotfail
# Ensure it's max 600px wide
mogrify -resize '>600x' "$TMP" || screenshotfail
# optimise the png if optipng is installed.
which optipng >/dev/null && optipng "$TMP"
# Copy to clipboard.
#
# This is what does not work for Thunderbird:
# xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png <"$TMP" || screenshotfail
# But this does:
echo "<img src='data:image/png;base64,"$(base64 -w0 "$TMP")"' />" | \
xclip -selection clipboard -t text/html || screenshotfail
# Remove the temp file.
rm -f "$TMP"
# Notify user.
notify-send -u low -i image "600px screenshot copied to clipboard"
I am trying to tweak the touchpad on Ubuntu 16.04 but none of the usual methods seem to work. e.g.
synclient touchpadOff=1
It still works!
$ xinput set-prop $DEVICE_ID "Device Enabled" 0
$ xinput list-props 15 |head -n2
Device 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad':
Device Enabled (168): 0
...it still works!
I can disable it from the Settings app. but I want to be able to map this to a keyboard shortcut, so I'm looking for a command line solution.
Bonus points if you answer works in Gnome-Shell as well as Unity :-)
$ xinput
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ ELAN Touchscreen id=12 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ DLL06E4:01 06CB:7A13 Touchpad id=13 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=15 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Sleep Button id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Integrated_Webcam_HD id=11 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=14 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Dell WMI hotkeys id=16 [slave keyboard (3)]
Nb. I have used 15 for $DEVICE_ID
You can do it in a one liner, but this way you get a nice notification, too. I've attached this to a shortcut key and it works a charm. Thanks all.
#!/bin/bash
if xinput list-props 13 | grep "Device Enabled (168):.*1" >/dev/null
then
xinput disable 13
notify-send -u low -i mouse "Trackpad disabled"
else
xinput enable 13
notify-send -u low -i mouse "Trackpad enabled"
fi
I have a bunch of Ubuntu machines on my work ethernet LAN and I need to modify the default gateway.
I'd rather not traipse round, interrupt people's work, to right click an applet, preferring instead to ssh in, which can be automated :-)
I know I can change the default live gateway with ip route replace default via 1.2.3.4 but this does not update NM's stored connection.
In my case each machine will only have one stored wired connection.
How can I update the stored gateway IP from the command line?
I have Calibri installed because it's the default font for M$ Office and so many of my clients send me documents using this font.
But it displays without anti-aliasing which is horrible. It's like being on a Windoze machine again :-O
It only seems to happen at small sizes; it's antialiased at larger sizes. Can I disable this?
EDIT:
My /etc/fonts/config.avail/10-antialias.conf contains
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<!-- Use the Antialiasing -->
<match target="font">
<edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
And
% fc-match calibri
calibri.ttf: "Calibri" "Regular"
Looking for a GUI mass file renamer that can be run from a selection of files in Nemo. Nemo has a built-in placeholder for a mass rename tool so you can provide the name of the app to run to rename multiple files. The files selected are passed as URIs on the command line.
I have looked at pyrenamer, gprenamer and neither seem to accept a list of files from the command line.
Anyone know of any?
I like a few features of Nemo, but there seems to be a theme problem - at least when running under Ubuntu Gnome 14.04:
As you can see from this screenshot:
it's not possible to see which of the breadcrumbs is selected, and the barchart for available space seems to be colouring both full and free the same colour!
In the screenshot I have the "global dark theme" on, but it's the same problem without this.
Clementine says missing gstreamer plugin when I try to play a .m4a file. Totem and Rhythm Box play it fine.
$ wajig listinstalled gstreamer0.10
gstreamer0.10-alsa:amd64
gstreamer0.10-nice:amd64
gstreamer0.10-plugins-base:amd64
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good:amd64
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly:amd64
gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio:amd64
gstreamer0.10-x:amd64
libgstreamer0.10-0:amd64
I'm on Trusty, Clementine was great on Precise, so keen to get it working again.
I am looking for an app to help me chop bits off start and end of an mp4 file efficiently and losslessly.
e.g. is there something that lets me find a keyframe and copy the lot between that and another keyframe, without needing to re-encode the lot (slow and lossy), and without losing AV sync?
By mp4, I mean H264 video + AAC audio in an MP4 container
Pre h264 days Avidemux was an excellent tool for this as you can reuse the original encoded streams meaning no loss and take just a few seconds to create the trimmed version, but it is hopeless with h264 - opening one gives you two options: use safe mode (which loses AV sync massively) or use the dangerous mode which immediately crashes it.
AFAIK, Openshot, Kdenlive, Pitivi etc. will all do this by decoding and recoding (slow and lossy).
Seems a simple thing (probably showing my lack of knowledge here!), so was wondering if I'm missing something.
I've just run out of disk space on /. Looking into the situation I realised that since first installing 12.04, Ubuntu has upgraded the kernel ~23 times and has kept every old kernel, binaries and header sources.
I've just manually apt-get purge-ed all but the last couple, saving ~4Gb space (on a 20Gb partition, so that's v. significant). Why would Ubuntu want to keep all of those? Is it lack of a feature such as "keep last 4" or is there some other reason?
CUPS has always had a configurable set of "Default Options" for a print queue.
system-config-printer also enables editing these.
But applications (see below) seem to completely ignore these! I'm sure (I've been using Debian/Ubuntu for 10 years) they didn't use to ignore them.
Is there some issue somewhere? Or a configuration option I've got wrong somewhere? Or a fix/workaround?
I've noticed that if I create a new user, the defaults are there. So there must be a user setting somewhere - But where?!
I know there's no point asking a question like this without specifics, so here you go:
applications which disrespect defaults: Firefox, DigiKam, EOG ("Image Viewer"), LibreOffice 3, Thunderbird, Evince ("Document Viewer"). I haven't found a single application that does respect the defaults.
Environment: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with Gnome Shell.
Printer driver (stock, from Ubuntu): "HP Photosmart 7510 Series, hpcups 3.12.2"
A specific example is that the default options say: duplex, "best" quality, "plain paper", but the apps all default to non-duplex, "high resolution photo" quality, "photo paper". This means it takes 10 minues per sheet, and costs a fortune in ink!
I'm concerned about the amount of proprietary software that seems to be part of Ubuntu now. I've noticed quite a few apps that in the software center are listed as "Licence: proprietary".
Obviously there's the partner stuff, like Skype (although that's not good example as it doesn't work in the Software Center) but there seems to be a fair load of other stuff creeping in, too.
Is there something I've not understood here? Is it all in partner or is some proprietary stuff in the main Ubuntu repos?
Is there a way to filter for FOSS?
The open source bit is important to me - I don't just want a free-beer OS as I think open source software model is better. Debian is strictly FOSS (AFAIK), for example.
Thinking of trying to tweak a theme to get Inkscape more compact. Was wondering if there was a way to tell which version of GTK+ it uses?
I'm using Gnome Shell (although I'm not sure whether the "Printers" app is part of that or just part of Gnome).
I go to "Printers" from the overview, click the + button on the bottom left, choose network and then see a message "FirewallD is not running. Network printer detection needs services mdns, ipp, ipp-client and samba-client enabled on firewall.".
It's not auto detected anything. There's an Address box and a Search by Address tickbox, but neither seem to do anything. I'm frustrated because I know all the details of the printer, but have nowhere to put them in. Automation is supposed to make things easier, no?
For example I know the printer is at lpd://10.67.5.3/lp1 but I can't put this in anywhere.
Is there a GUI that works, or have I misunderstood how to use it?
On some key folders in nautilus I've changed the folder icons. It looks nice, and aids my productivity because I can easily find important folders in a mass of others.
But then I move to another machine and all the folders are plain again.
So the question is where is this stored, and is there a way to have it persist between users/systems.
Feeling disempowered by Ubuntu's new bug reporting policy/system. My Intel i5 machines have all experienced daily (if not more frequent) freezes, but it's very difficult to report bugs now and policy instead is just for ubuntu to collect counts; no way for me to see that anything is (or is not) being worked on.
I've just experienced a freeze and now on reboot I'm stuck in a cycle of "Ubuntu has an internal error" (presumably Ubuntu never experiences an external error...) do you want to report it? Yes. Oh another internal error...
It looks like this report could contain useful information. Is there anyway to make sure it gets provided to the people who can fix it?
There are lots of posts on this about Unity, this is about GNOME shell.
As with other posters, I use apps (Inkscape in particular) that uses Alt-Click and Alt-drag. GNOME shell is grabbing this off me and thus disabling features in the application.
I have tried
using ccsm's Move plugin - you can turn this off and you still get Alt-drag window moving.
using gconf editor to change /apps/metacity/general/mouse_button_modifier - this has no effect AFAICS.
It's really hindering me. Otherwise I find GNOME shell a really productive environment.
On the command line I regularly use locate, or more often a locate x | grep y pattern to find a file I know exists but can't find!
I'd like something that did this quickly in the GUI. Can't find it if it's there.
Here's my confusion
In the applications/overview I can see Search and Indexing. This seems to be a configuration tool. But if this is a server, I can't find a client.
In applications I find Nepomuk File Indexing -- I think this is a KDE thing? Ditto, no client?
I've installed tracker. This is a strange mix of powerful and unreliable/limited. e.g. it doesn't find files like locate does (returns no results where locate returns 96 results), but is will unpack every tag I've added to my photos! And you can't limit by folder for a quick search within a folder.
The old Gnome 2 Search for files... thing is not in the Accessories menu anymore.
I feel that this is basic/core-level functionality and I can't help feeling I'm missing something obvious.